Assets such as advertising materials or items of programming content are provided in connection with various communications networks such as broadcast networks and data networks. In the advertising context, these assets include commercials inserted into commercial breaks of broadcast television or radio, product placement advertising embedded into pre-recorded or live programming, banner ads, pop-up ads and the like. These different types of assets have been used in different contexts and have different relative advantages that have been the subject of considerable attention by asset providers, network providers and other interested parties.
In the case of broadcast television, commercials broadcast during commercial breaks have long been a significant source of revenues. These commercials can be designed to use full motion video and audio content to create viewer impressions that have substantial impact. Moreover, large audiences can be reached with some degree of targeting based on the demographics of the audience of the associated programming. Indeed, television advertising has been integral to the marketing of some of the most valuable brands of our era.
Of course, though, there are limitations to the effectiveness of television advertising. For example, air time for such advertising is expensive, particularly in connection with programming having the largest audiences of the most desirable demographics. In part because of the high value of such advertising spots, advertisers are limited, as a practical matter, to brief time intervals to make the desired impression and convey sufficient information to advance potential sales opportunities. Moreover, because of the passive nature of the broadcast experience, viewers are generally not in a position to immediately consummate a transaction or even, in most cases, to record information for later use. The latter shortcoming has led to the art forms of jingles, mnemonics and the like to assist viewers in retaining important advertising information.
By contrast, advertising in data networks can take advantage of interactive functionality to improve ad effectiveness. For example, users can select links of interest, in some cases, to delve deeper into details of interest and obtain more customized content. However, such data network advertising is not effective in reaching some consumers. In addition, such advertising can be easily avoided or disregarded by some network users. Moreover, metrics for measuring the effectiveness of such advertising are still being developed, particularly in contexts where the ads do not lead to an immediate “click.”
Accordingly there is a continuing effort to provide effective asset delivery to users of multiple networks in different use modes. Ideally, asset providers would like to utilize the comparative advantages of each network. It would also be useful to better understand how such assets lead to actual purchase decisions (in the case of commercial assets) so as to “close the loop” concerning analysis of asset effectiveness. In this regard, it would be useful to verify consumption of assets and to collect consumer behavior information for correlation with the verified consumption data to provide a better understanding of asset effectiveness.
Some efforts have been made to provide follow-on information in relation to network ads. For example, systems have been proposed where a specialized remote can attempt to track television ads of interest such that the remote can then be downloaded at a data terminal to access related information via the data network. However, this requires specialized equipment and may be inconvenient if the data terminal and television are not at the same locations. Systems have also been proposed where a specialized remote can bookmark the present date, time, and channel in response to a user input. Using this bookmarked information in combination with stored information relating to the fixed advertisement schedule, the system can provide a list of Internet web addresses that relate to ads of interest. The links can then be viewed either at the television or they may be viewed at a separate computer after the user has downloaded the addresses from the specialized remote to the computer or manually entered the addresses into the Internet browser. However, this requires specialized equipment and, if the viewer does not wish to view the follow-on information at the television itself, requires the viewer to initiate and undertake additional steps to access the follow-on information. In addition, the system does not account for and would not function within a targeted advertising environment in which different ads (by one or multiple asset providers) are delivered during a given ad spot.
In addition, it is believed that systems have been implemented, to some extent, that enable a user of a personal video recorder (“PVR”) device to provide an input in relation to specified ads, for which additional information has been stored, and thereby access the stored information. However, this requires use of storage resources at the PVR and has limited functionality in relation to network data transfer.